


but what would you do if i was there with you ;)

by arinrowan



Series: a/s/l [2]
Category: Yu-Gi-Oh!, Yu-Gi-Oh! Series
Genre: Anzu attempts to explain how communication works to Kaiba, Anzu has been through a lot, Gen, Kaiba is still trying to make it Yuugi/Kaiba, M/M, Other, and is very worried about her friends, it is probably not super effective, it's still not happening, jonouchi is a good friend even if he's not directly in this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-04
Updated: 2018-08-04
Packaged: 2019-06-21 13:58:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15559230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arinrowan/pseuds/arinrowan
Summary: Anzu had just wanted to graduate high school and study dance in America. She's not sure how that turned into trying to keep her childhood friend and his headmate- because apparently you can get headmates by solving ancient fidget puzzles- alive and sane and with their souls in the same body throughout high school, but it's happened, and she's dealing with it.Sort of.Well, she's trying.She feels like she's managing better than Kaiba, anyway.





	but what would you do if i was there with you ;)

Anzu wanted to say she wasn’t sure who to blame for her life turning into a poorly paced shounen anime, but the problem was she knew exactly who to blame. And blaming the manifestation of an ancient amnesiac, probably Egyptian spirit (oh my god) who was headmates with one of her childhood friends (OH MY GOD) and who she had had a very annoying crush on (OH. MY. GOOOOOD) didn’t accomplish anything. Especially since Yami would agree everything was his fault and get depressed, and then Yuugi would be sad, and then Jonouchi-kun would get stressed out because he couldn’t punch whatever was upsetting Yuugi. Besides, most of what happened wasn’t really Yami’s fault. Stuff just happened around him. Stuff like, people getting caught on fire, or people getting held hostage at their part-time jobs they weren’t even supposed to have, or people getting their SOULS RIPPED OUT OF THEIR BODIES BECAUSE THEY LOST A CARD GAME. None of that had happened their first few months of high school. No one tried to kill anyone, no one had any nervous breakdowns except for poor Shimada-kun over in class 2-C when he got the grades back from their first major test, and Anzu hadn’t had to keep making up assignments and competing with Kaiba-kun for most consecutive absences to follow people around the world playing a card game she didn’t even like all that much. 

It was their lunch break and she and Yuugi were finishing up their lunches in the back of the classroom. Honda-kun had dragged Jonouchi-kun out of the classroom at the start of the break, muttering something about bread wars and Otogi-kun, and it seemed normal enough she was fine not knowing. Bakura-kun had crept out when no one was looking. Kaiba-kun was absent again, since they didn’t have a test until next Wednesday, and she’d read something in the news on the way to class about a Kaibacorp merger or buyout. As long as it didn’t end in another card tournament. Mentally she reviewed their testing schedule this semester and determined Kaiba-kun wouldn’t set up another tournament until at least next month, after the midterms. Unless someone challenged him or Yuugi to a game, in which case Kaiba-kun was guaranteed to overreact, especially if Yuugi was the one challenged first. 

Yuugi had large enough bags under his eyes that Anzu wondered if he’d gotten any sleep, but during their math period she noticed he’d finally caught up. Anzu had managed that three days before, along with the English assignment, but she was still behind in their biology section. That wasn’t going to really matter until next week anyway, but Anzu hated being behind in class. It made it that much harder to prepare for the next disaster, which was absolutely going to happen because they KEPT HAPPENING. Jonouchi-kun was still behind but Jonouchi-kun was always behind and by this point she thought the main reason he was even showing up to class was that Yuugi was there and it was easier to keep an eye on him.

Yuugi was gnawing on his second riceball disinterestedly and had the look he got when he was thinking about Kaiba-kun, and had spent most of the morning looking at Kaiba-kun’s empty desk with said look. Yuugi didn’t know he had a Kaiba-kun look, which was distinct from Yami’s Kaiba-kun look. Anzu was about seventy percent sure Jonouchi-kun knew Yuugi had a Kaiba-kun look but absolutely was NOT going to ask him. Jonouchi-kun was weirdly observant when it came to what Yuugi was thinking or feeling. He also had an uncanny ability to tell when Yami and Yuugi were both present instead of the thing where they timeshared Yuugi’s body like it was an Okinawan beach rental. Because, you know. Another person was just. Living inside her childhood friend. And had a different enough personality and voice and mannerisms that it had taken her months to recognize they were even using the same body; had taken her ALMOST DYING SEVERAL TIMES to realize the boy she had a crush on was actually a DISEMBODIED SPIRIT LIVING IN HER FRIEND. Which her friend was just fine with. Because apparently that just happened sometimes. You solved a shiny fidget puzzle and got possessed by a vengeance spirit who even if he was increasingly calmer and seemed to spend most of his free time crashing the Bejewled servers (and Yami was NEVER allowed to use her phone again) was apparently responsible for several mysterious deaths. 

…And she still had a crush on him. Whyyyyyy. 

“So have you heard from Kaiba-kun since we got back,” Anzu found her mouth asking, without any apparent input from her brain. 

Yuugi started, ripping his gaze from Kaiba-kun’s desk and back to his riceball, and proceeded to turn the colour of a tomato while talking very rapidly. “Ah, no, it’s just- uh. Well. He- well he sent some texts last night and I think he was confused and I know he’s been tired lately and I just wanted to uh- anyway, he seems fine?”  
That was… a lot of false starts, even for Yuugi talking about Kaiba-kun, which meant he was actually worried. Anzu felt the first stirring of uneasiness and hoped nothing was wrong, other than the stress of whatever business was happening with Kaibacorp. “Did you check in with Mokuba-kun?” 

Mokuba-kun, after Duelist Kingdom, had become their Kaiba barometer, with Yuugi as their point of contact. He could be reliably consulted if you wanted to know whether Kaiba-kun was missing class to play a card game, missing class because he was in a magically-induced coma (that had only happened the once, except for the other times it had sort of happened, so Anzu wasn’t ruling out comas unless someone told her otherwise), missing class because their classmate was somehow responsible for a billion dollar corporation and that meant board meetings and shareholders, or missing class because he was actually sick with a physical illness. Also, the only reason Mokuba-kun wouldn’t reply to Yuugi was because he had gotten kidnapped. Again. Which Mokuba-kun seemed to treat like an unavoidable minor inconvenience, like the conbini being out of your favourite kind of riceball or the train being late, instead of something horrible that made the inside of her stomach crawl. 

Yuugi scrunched up his nose in that way that made him look like he was trying not to sneeze. “Yes, it’s just- anyway, Mokuba-kun says he’s just been working a lot after we got back, and that there’s a – merger? So he’s been super busy and since we don’t have any tests until next week we probably won’t see him until then, so there’s a lot going on, and he’s busy.” He fidgeted with his necklace, which most likely meant Yami was adding his own commentary to the conversation. 

“You could- go see him?” offered Anzu, which felt like a terrible idea because it was a terrible idea. 

Yuugi blanched, which since he’d spent most of the conversation bright red meant his complexion was mostly back to normal. “No it’s- I’m sure he’ll be in class again soon, and everything’s fine!” 

Anzu wanted to ask Yami, who was more likely to give her a direct answer even if it came through Yuugi, but then the door to the classroom slammed open and Jonouchi-kun ran in holding an armload of packaged breads, with Honda-kun right behind him and also carrying an armload of bread, and Bakura-kun with a frazzled, confused look and even more bread. And then Otogi-kun and several of his classmates burst through the door and there was a lot of yelling and a lot of bread being thrown around (she grabbed a red-bean bun that was dropped in the confusion and put it in her bag for later) and the time for asking Yuugi questions about his feelings or getting Yami’s input was over. 

Halfway through their science class Anzu’s phone went off on vibrate. She fished it out of her bag, since the teacher was writing on the board, unlocked it and read it. It was from Mokuba-kun. 

“Can you meet my brother after class at the usual place?”

Anzu’s stomach tied itself in a knot. So much for catching up on her biology homework.  
_____________________________________________________________________________  
The thing was this. 

She wanted to go to school in America. She wanted to dance. She wanted to take the rhythm she felt under her skin and translate it into movement for the world to see. And since she hadn’t gotten into a dance academy in Japan for high school (not enough training, not enough practice, she REFUSED to think not enough skill), she was going to have to figure out how to do it another way. And that meant earning money- for dance classes, for travel, for studying abroad. 

She’d tried to do it the normal way. She’d lied on the application for the burger place, spent a week or two sneaking out from school and changing into her work uniform and freaking herself out anytime a student with a similar school uniform entered the building. Then the robbery had happened. Then she’d met Yami, even if she hadn’t known it. Then she’d, for the first time in her life, thought she was going to die, and sat next to someone as they did. 

Her manager had been very polite about it. Maybe there were manuals for that sort of thing? How to talk to your employee after they almost get killed on the job. He offered to write her a reference to any job, but it was hard to hold a job when you kept having to miss work because of card games or one of your friends getting kidnapped or people getting their souls stolen or uploaded to a video cassette. Which was apparently an actual THING that could happen, in real life, not just in a horror manga. Anzu’s parents didn't understand why she’d gotten in the habit of covering the television screen with a towel when no one was using it, which probably wouldn’t save her if someone wanted to challenge her to a Shadow Game through the television, but it made her feel a little bit better when she had to go to the bathroom at night with the lights off. So she’d been trying to figure out how to earn more money despite all of that, and then Duelist Kingdom had happened, and then she’d gotten some texts from Mokuba-kun on behalf of his brother and things just… sort of happened. 

Jonouchi-kun had accused her at least once of enjo kousai way back before they’d really known each other, and she remembered slapping him over it. And, she kept reminding herself, this wasn’t really enjo kousai. Enjo kousai was supposed to involve more… physical stuff, and was supposed to be about spending time in the other person’s presence. The thing with Kaiba-kun wasn’t like that. He didn’t ever really look at her. She was pretty sure she could show up to the meetings in full cosplay or a formal kimono and he would pay her the same level of attention, which was to say, almost none. She didn’t take that personally. Kaiba-kun didn’t look at people until something about them caught his attention and then it was like he couldn’t stop looking. He might not look at her but the way he looked at Yuugi or Yami was like he was staring into their souls. And both of them would just sort of turn and faced him and look at him the same way and like it was perfectly normal instead of the sort of thing that would make her skin crawl. Plus, the… services Kaiba-kun was paying her for were things she would have done on her own. If she’d had the money, or the know-how, or the absolute lack of boundaries and ethics. 

The usual meeting place was one of the Kaibacorp card parlours. She figured Kaiba-kun liked this one because it was two subway stops from the main building, close enough that he could walk there and far enough that he could use it as an excuse to leave the general area around Kaibacorp. Also this location had very good bubble tea, according to the online reviews and the one time she’d ordered some while waiting. Maybe Kaiba-kun liked bubble tea. It seemed like the sort of thing Mokuba-kun would have tried to see if his brother liked. 

Anzu checked in at the front desk and was told she’d have to wait. She got out her homework and started reviewing, while keeping half an eye on the card games happening around the room. It was just… so weird to see people playing the game for fun. Anzu was good enough at Duel Monsters (she had to be), but she wasn’t a professional player, not on the level of Kaiba-kun or Yuugi or even Jounouchi-kun. To be a professional player you had to practice, and it was hard to make herself play a game when she kept remembering Shadow Games, kept thinking about people dying or their faces going blank when they lost. 

…Also it wasn’t even that good a card game, honestly. The artwork on the cards was gorgeous but the rules never seemed to make much sense and the deck building strategies were inconsistent. Not that she would ever let any of the guys hear her say that. 

She got about halfway through her review when one of the waiters let her know she could head to the back. She packed her homework away and wondered what this was about. Was something going on with the merger that was going to impact them? Had someone threatened Mokuba-kun again, or was someone else trying to challenge Yuugi? Kaiba-kun usually notified her for ground-level threats, but for one to come so close on the heels of the previous one was worrying, and probably meant it wasn’t going to stay ground-level for long. 

Kaiba-kun was sitting at a desk surrounded by what looked like three security camera feeds and a laptop. She closed the door behind her and headed to the other chair in front of his desk. Kaiba-kun looked normal, which meant he looked like he hadn’t slept in a week and was living off of energy drinks and protein packets. 

“No one’s tried to challenge him other than Jounouchi-kun,” reported Anzu as she sat down, since that was always the first question Kaiba-kun asked. She grimaced. “Also Bakura-kun, but there was something about an explosion that afternoon so I don’t think it counted as an official Duel Monsters game.” Bakura-kun was a very sweet boy, really, but his headmate was… not sweet, or nice, or anything other than a jerk, and whenever the four of them were alone property damage happened. Yuugi seemed to genuinely like spending time with them but Yuugi also seemed to like spending time with Kaiba-kun, so Yuugi’s judgment was questionable. Anzu had decided that as long as Bakura-kun’s headmate didn’t try to steal their souls again, she was ignoring the entire situation. 

Kaiba-kun made a noncommittal grunt and kept focusing on the computer screens. Anzu looked at the wall, which was an ugly off-white, and waited for him to continue. He wasn’t much of a conversationalist. “Did you tell Yuugi about the tracking devices?” he said, with absolutely no warning. 

Anzu’s brain screeched to a halt. “Did I tell Yuugi about the tracking devices,” she repeated. “The tracking devices you hired me to put on him, without telling him, that I’m only agreeing to not tell him about because he would get rid of them the next time he runs into trouble and it would make it that much harder to stop him from getting himself hurt?”

“Yes,” said Kaiba-kun, with an annoyed look that meant he thought 3/4 s of what she had just said was unnecessary and she was wasting his time. “Are there other tracking devices you know of?” If there are, his expression also managed to say, why haven’t you told me about them and who put them there. 

“No,” said Anzu, resisting the urge to glare at him. Kaiba-kun could out-glare anyone with the possible exception of Pegasus, who didn’t count because one of his eyes was a prosthetic. “I did not tell Yuugi about the tracking devices.” 

Kaiba-kun made a non-committal grunt and started typing at his laptop furiously. He didn’t say anything. Anzu resisted the urge to roll her eyes when the silence went on for long enough it was obvious she would need to jumpstart the conversation. “Why are you asking if I told Yuugi about the tracking devices?” she prompted. 

“Because he asked me about them,” said Kaiba-kun, not taking his eyes off the screens. He wasn’t ignoring her- Kaiba-kun’s attention was like a floodlight, even if it wasn’t pointing directly at you it spilled over everything- but conversations with him that weren’t about dueling took about twice as much work as a normal conversation with someone else. 

Anzu tensed. “He knows about them?” She’d been so careful with them. She’d even considered placing one on the puzzle but that had just felt- wrong, in a way that twisted her stomach even more than planting tracking devices on him without telling him did. She told herself it didn’t matter how she felt about it, the trackers might be the difference between finding them in time and Yuugi burning alive or bleeding out or getting his soul and Yami’s ripped out. Yuugi was her friend, and Yami was her- she cared about Yami. Anything she could do so they were less likely to die, she’d do it. 

She wasn’t sure how she felt about Kaiba-kun paying her for it as well, but. She would have done it anyway, on her own. Without getting paid. That had to be enough. 

Kaiba-kun did the thing where he hunched in on himself and glared at the screen. Maybe it looked more intimidating from a dueling platform. Mostly with the jacket it made Anzu think of an irritated turtle, which reminded her of helping her cousin rescue turtles from the road. Turtles had surprisingly large bladders and reacted to anything unexpected by peeing, and wow, this metaphor was taking her brain places she wanted to avoid. “I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking you. You’re the one who planted them and after the blonde idiot are the person who spends the most time with him.” 

And Jonouchi-kun didn’t talk to Kaiba-kun without Yuugi, even if Kaiba-kun had, to her knowledge, sort of wound up hiring him to look after Yuugi.

It was kind of her fault. He was, more or less, paying her to keep an eye on Yuugi, who, after all the times her childhood friend had almost died, really needed eyes on him. The more eyes the better. And Kaiba-kun had said something derogatory about Jonouichi-kun, and she’d pointed out that Jonouchi-kun did even more work keeping Yuugi safe to the point where Kaiba-kun might as well be paying him too, and then Kaiba-kun had gotten a look on his face like he’d bitten into a lemon only to discover it was a mikan and hadn’t decided how to react. He’d never brought it up again, but after that conversation, Jonouchi-kun had stopped getting this pinched look on his face whenever money came up, and he wasn’t skipping lunch most days anymore. She refused to feel guilty about it. Not happening. Jonouchi-kun needed the money even more than she did. And hey, if Kaiba-kun didn’t say anything about it, and Jonouchi-kun didn’t say anything about it, it wasn’t like she was really lying. She was just… not talking about it. To the people involved in the situation who might not be aware they were involved in the situation. 

“He was… worrying about you, earlier,” Anzu said, since Kaiba-kun didn’t seem like he’d say anything else and she wanted this meeting to end at some point in the next hour. “He was texting Mokuba-kun to see if things were alright.” 

Kaiba hunched over further and Anzu’s brain tried to go back to turtles. Nope, not happening. “Did the two of you… fight about something?” she tried. She hadn’t heard about the two of then having a Shadow Game or challenging the other to a duel, and the way they fought, she wouldn’t have NOT heard about it. 

Kaiba’s typing sped up. “There was a…. miscommunication, last night. About something else.” 

Anzu felt her eyebrows rise. ‘Miscommunication’. The only times Yuugi and Yami talked with Kaiba-kun were when dueling was involved, and she wasn’t really sure how you miscommunicated about that. Unless, you know, one person thought a card game meant a casual game between classmates, and the other person thought it meant a giant grudge that could only be settled by spending millions of dollars on a murderous theme park and creating holographic monsters and sending people to the hospital with HEART ATTACKS. 

…He’d created holographic, interactive technology for the sole purpose of defeating Yami and Yuugi in a card game. Who would WANT that kind of focus on them? Kaiba-kun was the type of person where if you argued about whose turn it was to do the dishes, he’d build a five story dish cleaning mecha. Too intense, WAY too intense. But Yuugi and Yami kept meeting him, kept facing him, regardless of whatever else they encountered in the way, and she thought about Yuugi in grade school, in middle school, their first year of high school, with a giant bag of games with him to share with everyone and an open, earnest look on his face. Her childhood friend; his headmate who saved her life and made her heart speed up; and they kept rising to the challenge. Kaiba-kun somehow wasn’t the worst person to issue it. 

“A miscommunication about a game?” asked Anzu, once it became obvious Kaiba-kun wasn’t going to go into any further details without a response. 

Kaiba-kun wasn’t the kind of person who squirmed but if he was he would have been, and great, she wasn’t going to be able to think about turtles for at least a week. “…It involved… personal information. Tracking devices came up at the end.”

Anzu frowned. She was pretty sure Kaiba-kun knew everything about Yuugi from his blood type to his deck construction, and that Yuugi knew Kaiba-kun knew everything about Yuugi, so she was mildly concerned as to what personal information Kaiba-kun could want from Yuugi that would result in Yuugi getting worried or make Kaiba-kun this visibly uncomfortable to discuss it. Unless- her brain screeched to a halt. Had. Had Yuugi asked KAIBA-KUN personal information? Had Kaiba-kun GIVEN Yuugi personal information? Was that why he was worried? 

“Have you tried… talking to him about it?” Anzu found herself asking, without any input from her brain. The same way she would have if one of her regular, non-CEO classmates who hadn’t tried to kill her or her friends at least once mentioned having an issue with a friend. 

Kaiba-kun looked up from his computer and stared at her like she was significantly more of an idiot than he usually found her, which was fair, because she had just asked Kaiba-kun if he’d tried using his words when his primary mode of communication involved card games or corporate takeovers. Or attempting to combine both. Still. “Yuugi can’t actually read your mind, you know,” she said. “Yami can’t either.” Kaiba-kun made an annoyed sound in the back of his throat like he was trying to gargle salt water and looked back at the computer. She assumed that was because she’d brought up Yami and not because he had to cough. Kaiba-kun was fine with acknowledging Yami’s existence as long as he didn’t have to acknowledge Yami’s existence. It could also be because she’d brought up emotions. “Sometimes you do have to actually say what you mean, not just want people to know what you mean.” 

Kaiba-kun frowned. He always looked like he was frowning, but when he really meant it there was a weird wrinkle under his eye that curled. “I was perfectly clear. He was the one who misunderstood.” 

Anzu didn’t know much about what Kaiba-kun’s home life had been like, other than that he’d been adopted into the Kaiba family and that his adoptive father had died recently, but at moments like this she was comfortable assuming no one in the family had been good with communication. “Communication involves two people,” she explained slowly, the way she would when one of the kids she was babysitting was nailing their sibling with a stuffed animal because they wanted the other’s juicebox. “Meaning both people have to understand the other, in order for it to happen.” 

Kaiba-kun made another disgusted sound. “I was perfectly clear-“

“You were perfectly clear to YOU” Anzu interrupted, because really, this was a point that needed to be made and it could make all of their lives that much easier. “That doesn’t mean you were perfectly clear to HIM. The other person you were talking to.”

Kaiba-kun’s frown deepened, and his typing sped up even further. She wondered what his typing speed was. Or if he was just typing to make it look like he was busy so he didn’t have to act like he was thinking about what she was saying, and after she left he’d have a Word document filled with a bunch of random, misspelled words. 

She waited another five or six minutes, listening to the typing and trying not to think about turtles, but he didn’t say anything else. “I’ll ask around it and see if he knows about the tracking devices, or if he just figured out about them since you keep showing up around him,” she said finally. Which was also entirely plausible. Kaiba-kun wasn’t subtle. 

An idea occurred to her, which, like most of her ideas today, was terrible, but she still felt like she needed to ask. “Unless you want to show me the conversation and see if I can-“: 

Kaiba-kun looked up from the keyboard, stopped typing, and stared directly at her. Anzu swallowed, resisted the urge to crawl into a hole. “Right. That’s not happening. Okay.” 

Kaiba grunted, and like that, his attention flicked off of her and the meeting was over. She got up and let herself out. 

Tracking devices, Shadow games, headmates living inside her classmates, billionaires and strangers with magical powers showing up and threatening their lives because of Yuugi and Yami. All the kind of stuff that belonged in manga or anime, not with a group of high school students trying to make it to graduation. She thought about the red bean bun in her bag. She’d stop at a conbini on the way back, pick up some barley tea, and eat them together when she got home. She had homework to finish, and work to do, to be sure she’d be ready to stand next to Yuugi and Yami for whatever was going to happen next.

**Author's Note:**

> So apparently this is a thing. I have no idea if there's going to be a next section or when it might happen, since I never expected this to happen, but if it does happen it will probably be from Jonouchi's perspective and Kaiba will still fail to communicate with Yuugi about what he actually wants. If i do write it will probably be titled HOT BLONDES IN YOUR AREA or something of that ilk to keep with the theme. 
> 
> Anyway, Anzu in this is stuck dealing with a bunch of sticky ethical questions and worrying about what's best for her friend, and when your friend has a headmate and people keep trying to kill you and them it turns out there aren't a lot of easy answers about the best ways to help. Be nice to her, she's trying her best. 
> 
> Also, thanks to ickaimp for the idea of Kaiba paying Jounouchi for being Yuugi's bodyguard, even if I took that a slightly different place than she intended. 
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
